Why Origin Stories Aren't Always a Great Idea

Jessica Chastain in The Huntsman: Winter's War

This Friday marks the release of The Huntsman: Winter's War. To a broader audience, the question is "How do you make a sequel to Snow White and the Huntsman if Kristen Stewart isn't in it?" The truth is that you don't. You make a prequel of sorts in which we follow the origins of Ravenna (Charlize Theron) and her sister Freya (Emily Blunt). While there's a question as to how essential this story is, there's a bigger question as to what good it does to have origin stories in general. In an era where information is readily available at our fingertips, it doesn't make sense why films need to spell things out. While in the case of The Huntsman it could be seen as a cash grab, it is a trend that often damages story telling and in most cases adds nothing. I'm not saying that The Huntsman can't be good (especially with a high pedigree of actresses), but there's a renowned sense of pointlessness to the whole thing that reminds me of how dumb origin stories can be.

At its core, the origin story is a concept created to tell how something because what it was. It's something that we like to tell ourselves in order to understand the world around us. One of the best examples comes in literature with F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." While the story is largely about the aftermath of his identity, Jay Gatsby's birth as a middle class man who saves a rich sailor shows how confidence helped to build his persona, even if he's not confident enough to get the love of  his life: Daisy. The fact is that at their core, origin stories are part of the bigger puzzle, like a story's beginning, middle, and end. However, they also ruined contemporary cinema by a long stretch.

It may be tough to argue this when so many films can serve as the origin stories of any given franchise. For instance, The Godfather Part II has long flashbacks to Don Corleone's arrival in America. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly has a scene that explains how Clint Eastwood got his iconic poncho. What makes these work? Like "The Great Gatsby," they're part of a bigger story that explains how these characters function. They also don't diminish the ongoing story, which has little to do with making a big deal about how much of this imagery inspired the iconic stuff that we already know. 

There have always been origin stories, so the complaint that they're dumb is kinda misleading. It's the broader sense by which they have come to embody. I'm specifically talking about origin stories that exist to explain answers to other movies' works. The most common example is the much maligned Star Wars prequels, of which infamously turned audiences on creator George Lucas and lead to some baffling connections to the original and beloved films. Even if the first film in the late 90's wasn't the first to do this egregiously, it was the first to do it on such a scale that mainstream audiences noticed and would nitpick in ways that set precedent for the internet comments sections that followed.

Here's where things get tricky. What separates an origin story from just the first in a series? Would you call Iron Man or Spider-Man an origin story? Technically, yes. However, they have limited ties to a bigger picture (save for Iron Man's post credits scene). They are standalone stories that may show the birth of the superheroes, but they inevitably work on their own without feeling like they owe something to a bigger universe. By that count, Captain America: The First Avenger straddles the line between standalone and origin in that it works as a standalone story until the end, where there's the request to get The Avengers movie going (not to mention several character tie-ins). Still, it doesn't exactly request you to have seen the other non-Captain America films to follow the central story. In that sense, it works as a standalone.

To some extent, the real kick-off for origin stories came with Batman Begins, which inspired every superhero series to have their own background story. Of course, what Christopher Nolan was doing was rebooting the character in a way different from other establishments of the past 15 years. Still, we learned how Bruce Wayne became Batman, and that set off a bad trend. The Amazing Spider-Man retold the same story as Spider-Man despite the prior being a little over a decade old. Then came Man of Steel, which covered similar ground as Superman Returns. Even its sequel, Batman v. Superman, serviced as some sort of origin story for Batman yet again (not to mention for a very contrived plot point later on). 

It basically began to feel like contractual obligation to go from turning an origin story from the first act of a movie to the entire point of a story. The more that audiences became aware of these characters, the more explicit they seemed to become. In some cases, they merely served as a set-up for the next film, which has become Marvel's M.O. overall. It's a frustrating thing, and one that reflects cinema's growing reliability on shared universes. However, it does extend beyond superhero stories and sometimes comes for more beloved, universal properties that you wouldn't expect.

For instance, was it really important that we known the story behind Snow White and the Hunstman? What is gained by discovering information about Theron's character that couldn't be implied? The very idea of origin stories nowadays is to suck the fun out of the original text. Yes, the world is sequel hungry and there will always be a quest to mine familiar territory. However, the choice to make stories that exist to tell an origin instead of just a good story is baffling. It's bad writing, even if the central core is gripping. You have to work it into the context instead of expecting the audience to understand the significance sight unseen. 

I'm not saying that it can't work. After all, Batman Begins did a pretty good job with its material. However, most of these end up covering the minute details that just aren't important. It's why I look at The Huntsman trailer and not think that I'm in for a fun film, but wonder why anyone needs to know the story before the story. Just get to the story and entertain us already. It may not be entirely clear, but I think that prequels and origin stories in general nowadays aren't worth the time. The one plus is that the people who do the most "origins" nowadays, Marvel, actually tries to make them entertaining without forcing us to watch the heroes in diapers. Still, can we just agree that putting more details in an already good story is a bad idea? That is what an origin story is, and most of them suck at doing it.